“Rick Rubin would say: ‘We’ll try that song a different way. You’d be sitting there going: ‘Jesus, I’m sick of this bloody thing.’”: AC/DC lost their way in the 1980s. Two killer albums put them back on top in the 90s

AC/DC posing for a photograph in 1990.

February 1990, three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Newsweek magazine published a detailed analysis of the new German state in a cover story titled ‘A United Germany: The New Superpower’. Among its findings was the revelation that the newly liberated population flooding across the crumbled wall had boosted West Berlin record sales by 300 per cent. And the preferred soundtrack for the newly emancipated masses? The Dirty Dancing soundtrack and AC/DC.

The Anglo-Australian quintet entered the new decade in rude health, buoyed by the success of Blow Up Your Video, their most commercially successful album since For Those About To Rock, and with de facto band leader Malcolm Young newly energised and clear-headed having shaken off the alcohol addiction which had forced him to sit out months of the band’s subsequent world tour. “Angus was going: ‘I’m your brother; I don’t want to see you dead here. Remember Bon?’,” Malcolm admitted. “So I took that break and cleaned myself up.”